Renee Sieber

Sieber is a professor at McGill, jointly appointed between Geography and Environment, and affiliated with Computer Science. Her research sits at the intersection of public participation/civic engagement and software architectures, both theoretical (participatory theory) and computational (coding, algorithm development). 

She was the principal investigator of Geothink, the recently concluded pan-Canadian research initiative in local government (including open government data, crowdsourcing, Geographic Information Systems {GIS} and location-based technologies, and citizen science). Much of the research considered the role of technology in smart cities.

Sieber, alongside Bianca Wylie and others collaborated to compile a list of central questions citizens need to ask of Waterfront TO and Sidewalk Labs.

For this research, Sieber was made a fellow of the Association of American Geographers and received the lifetime achievement award in Geographic Information Science from the Canadian Association of Geographers.

Sieber is currently researching civic engagement in artificial intelligence, especially as citizens interact with smart cities.